


Madness

by DPPatricks



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Angst, M/M, Weirdness, spirituality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 11:27:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22849393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DPPatricks/pseuds/DPPatricks
Summary: Post Sweet Revenge, a terrible three days happen.
Relationships: Ken Hutchinson/David Starsky
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	Madness

**Author's Note:**

> Back in the 70s I read a short story by my favorite science fiction author, Roger Zelazny. I never forgot it and have used the kernel as a springboard for this piece. BTW, it is NOT a death fic! Originally posted on the Starsky&Hutch911 livejournal site on August 7, 2016, this is the third in what I call my mystical/spiritual series. It's been slightly edited for this cross-posting.

I glanced around my nearly patronless bar. The peanut shells and empty glasses on tables, chairs willy-nilly around them, and the colorful balls of a half-finished pool game were all mute witnesses to the bereft feeling of the place.

Returning my gaze to the dark curly-haired head bent over his beer glass, I caught the first words Starsky had spoken in over an hour.

“He was driving me crazy with his mother-henning,” said my best friend, hollowly. “Always trying to do everything for me. I felt like I was being smothered!” He sat up straight and smacked himself, hard, in the chest. “Look at me! I’m healed, almost ready to re-qualify. I didn’t need his constant hovering any more!”

An apparently unexpected sob shook him. Folding his arms on the bar, he dropped his forehead onto them. The position didn’t keep me from hearing, “But God, Hug, I don’t think I can live without him.” He looked up at me, pain like I’d never seen before in his glazed eyes. “I _loved_ him!”

With that explosive confession, the room and everything in it blurred out. Starsky and I were surrounded by a pulsing, warm-colored, glowing light that didn’t seem to have a source and was all-pervasive.

What could have been only seconds, or long hours, passed. Slowly, the light faded and The Pits came back into focus. Nothing had changed. Everyone had gone home after the wake, leaving Starsky and me alone. He was sitting on the stool in front of the bar, as he had been, and I was standing behind it.

“!him _loved_ I” rolled out of his mouth. His head lowered quickly to his forearms but I could still hear each word, “him without live can I think don’t I ,Hug ,God But”

He raised his head and stared at me. “Do you know what’s happening?” He appeared as confused and suspicious as I was.

I dropped my eyes while his next words tumbled out, backwards, “!more any hovering constant his need didn’t I .re-qualify to ready almost…”

When the first/last words of his complaint died away, I knew I had to meet his demanding look again. “My Aunt Celia --”

“Your Aunt Celia, what?” Starsky was obviously keeping a tight rein on his temper.

“She had a presentiment that something was going to happen.” When he didn’t say anything but kept staring at me, I grabbed a bar towel and wiped at the rings our two beer bottles had made. He picked his up so that I could do a decent job, saying nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, Starsky can show unbelievable patience.

“She had no idea what the ‘something’ was going to be.” I took a sip from my bottle after throwing the towel under the bar. “Only that it would be important in all our lives.”

“Was it a vision?” Starsky put a hand on my arm. “Did she see Hutch get killed?”

I shook my head. “No, I’m sure she didn’t! She’d have told me if she’d known that was coming.”

The front door opened and people began stepping backward into the bar by ones and twos, everyone keeping their voices down and avoiding looking at Starsky. The barely heard conversations were all in reverse. They retook seats at the tables, the bar, and in booths. Two uniforms in their dress blues unracked sticks and backed to the pool table.

Since Starsky hadn’t said anything for a while before they all began leaving, I knew we had a little time, and figured I’d better make the most of it.

“Two weeks ago,” I chose my words carefully, “Aunt Celia asked me to come over to her place. She had something to tell me.” I swallowed a few gulps of Dos Equis. “After I closed up, I went.”

Behind me, Diane and Anita undelivered snacks and drinks to the crowd that had showed up to pay their respects to a fallen cop. Starsky and I didn’t move because we hadn’t.

“She said she’d experienced a premonition. She was sure it was going to involve my two best friends.”

“I haven’t seen her in years, Huggy. How does she know me, or what I’m like now?”

“You haven’t changed, m’ brother.” I smiled at him. “She knew you at fourteen and, with everything I tell her all the time, she still knows you.”

Starsky ducked his head and shuddered. “I was a hell raiser at fourteen.”

“Weren’t we both?” I chuckled. “She’s perceptive, too. She always sees through my bullshit and cuts right to the chase.”

“Go on.” Starsky sipped from his brown bottle. “What did she say?”

“She told me I’d know, as soon as whatever it was, happened. And I wasn’t to let you out of my sight afterward for three days.”

“She foresaw that I’d get mad at Hutch and yell at him? That he’d leave, and never be able to come back?”

“Like I said, Starsky,” I repeated, “it wasn’t a vision, only a foreboding. She knew something would happen between you two, and it would be critical.”

Starsky nodded, suddenly fighting tears again. “I guess you could call dying ‘critical’.”

“Aunt Celia told me she understood that Hutch had been hovering,” I went on, trying to tip toe through this minefield. “She said he was holding on too tightly only because he was terrified of losing you again. You blowing your cool at some point was a given, she said, because you and Hutch never talked about your real feelings.”

“What feelings, Hug?” Starsky didn’t look at me, he stared into his beer. “And how does she know all this?”

I shrugged self-consciously. “I guess I talk about you two all the time when I’m there and, like I said, she’s perceptive. As for the question about real feelings?” I stared at him until he looked up. “What did you tell me not five minutes ago? What deep emotion did you confess that brought the light? And started all this…” I gestured around the room. “bass-ackwardness?”

A very long time seemed to pass while my pal said nothing, but it probably wasn’t more than a minute. A few people backed out of the rest rooms and the pool table regurgitated a ball. Drinks were unswallowed, peanuts went from mouths into bowls.

Looking at me uncertainly, Starsky took a deep breath. “I loved him.”

“Exactly.”

“I loved him,” Starsky repeated. “More than I’ve ever loved anybody in my whole life.” He choked on another sob. “He _was_ my life, Hug!”

“I know. But you never told him. Did you?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t know if he felt the same way and I couldn’t take the chance that he’d hate me.”

I put on my very best scowl and glared at him. At least he had the decency to blush after a while. “There is no way on this earth that that man could ever have hated you.”

“But don’t you see? I couldn’t risk it. So I kept my mouth shut and prayed that someday, somehow, the time would be right and we’d talk about it.”

“Instead…” I knew this was going to hurt but there was no way I could avoid it. “You ran out of patience with his doting, did the mad thing yourself, and ended up driving him out of here.”

Starsky slumped, utter defeat in his posture and on his face. “I killed him.”

“Three days ago, you did.” When he looked up, I put as much hope into my voice as I could. “But, if things…” I swept my hand toward the weird activity surrounding us, “keep going the way they are, you may just be able to change that.”

Starsky sat up and looked around. Captain Dobey, Edith, Minnie, Babcock, Simmons, plus all the other cops and civilians that had attended the funeral were talking in lowered voices, their sentences in reverse order, their gestures and movements exactly the opposite of the way they’d performed them an hour before. Time seemed to be moving backward.

“Three days,” he repeated. “Aunt Celia said you weren’t to leave me alone?”

I nodded.

“It’s been three days.” When he looked at this watch, both of us could see the sweep second hand clicking off the seconds, counter-clockwise. “Is this possible?” Starsky sounded afraid to believe.

“I don’t know, m’ man,” I admitted, “but it sure looks like it’s happenin’!”

“Can we go all the way back?” He grabbed my forearm. “Can I not say the things I did? Or apologize first? Make him not leave? Not die?”

“Why don’t we wait and see?” I picked up my bottle and clinked it lightly against my best friend’s. “To righting wrongs?”

“Oh, God,” he breathed, “I’ll drink to that.” After taking a long swallow, he looked at me, puzzled. “Did your Aunt Celia foresee this…” he glanced around at the back-stepping people. “This… weirdness?”

“I have no idea what she saw, Starsky.” I shrugged. “All I know is she told me I’d remember it for the rest of my life.”

*******

The next three days were the most bizarre I’ve ever experienced. And I don’t think I’d be wrong to say Starsky felt the same way.

First, he endured the good-intentioned reverse comments of all their friends at the wake. Since his replies had been mostly single words in the first place, they didn’t sound any different, except that they preceded the condolences.

Backing from The Pits to the cemetery, with a silent Starsky beside me, was strange enough, but unwalking to the grave, unlistening to the minister unsay the supposedly familiar words, watching the casket being raised from the ground so that we six pallbearers could unmarch it to the hearse, made me question my sanity. Before/after that though, driving in ‘R’ to the funeral home and unhearing Dobey’s eulogy, Starsky uncrying his tears next to me, went so far beyond The Twilight Zone I can’t imagine there’s a word for it.

Reliving the previous sleepless night, the day that had preceded relentlessly rewound itself. We unviewed the Assistant District Attorney unquestion the young couple charged with Hutch’s death, and their lawyer. They unswore they hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They’d been arguing. She was exceeding the speed limit a little and not paying attention. When he had grabbed the wheel, she’d lost control and the car had jumped the curb. They’d never seen the tall blond man standing on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

I think only because Starsky and I had already heard the words in proper order, were we able to understand the rewind.

Since Starsky and I hadn’t said anything during the time we had watched, we were able to talk, normally, a little more.

“If I hadn’t yelled at him, Hutch wouldn’t have left. He wouldn’t have been in the path of that car. Wouldn’t have been run down and killed.”

“Wouldn’t have’s, might have’s, coulda been’s… Let’s just see where this unraveling is gonna take us, okay?”

Silently, Starsky nodded. And he grabbed my arm, squeezing hard.

*******

The day before was worse in replay. The autopsy, which Starsky had insisted on viewing from the student’s balcony, was more gruesome in a way, to me, than watching it in forward motion. I couldn’t talk him out of it, either time. I think he was even paler though, after the backward procedure.

I undrove him to the morgue from my place, after I’d uneaten my own breakfast and Starsky had not eaten his. Again.

He unslept and we untalked. After Hutch had been killed, I’d removed all sharp objects from my apartment and insisted Starsky stay with me. I never let him out of my sight, as Aunt Celia had instructed.

When we’d finally unmade it through the agony of the accident scene being uninvestigated and all the witnesses being uninterviewed, Starsky and I unran back inside The Pits. He lurched onto his stool and I unscrambled behind the bar, unreaching for the coffee pot.

The door unclosed and Hutch unwalked, stiffly and obviously under rigid control, backward, through the crowd to his former perch and sat down.

Starsky looked at me, hope and desperation vying in his eyes. Reaching a hand out, he grasped his partner’s left arm. “I’m sorry.” He was still staring at me, as if afraid to look at the object of his apology.

Hutch appeared startled and, with a subtle flash of unfocused light that maybe only Starsky and I noticed, I knew everyone’s sweep second hands were moving clockwise again.

“What?” Hutch had clearly not expected those words.

Starsky turned to him, dropping his hand awkwardly. “I’m sorry, Hutch. I said some terrible things. Please don’t leave.”

Hutch glanced at me but I figured I’d done my part. I got them each a fresh beer.

Out front, the shriek of screeching tires made everyone look toward the door. When no metal crunched though, and there was no sound of impact, people went back to their own business.

With a quick glance at me, as if for reinforcement, Starsky swallowed a gulp of beer and put the bottle on the bar. His eyes had lost their frantic intensity and he turned the softening, warming look on his partner. “I love you.”

Hutch almost lost his balance but Starsky caught his arm in time to steady him.

“What did you say, Starsk?”

“I love you,” Starsky repeated, more firmly, but still quietly enough that I’m pretty sure nobody else heard him except me. And Hutch. “I’ve been angry lately because it was never the right time to tell you.” He stroked his hand up and down the arm he still held. “Once in a while, I was pretty sure you felt the same way but I was never certain enough to --”

“I do,” Hutch interrupted. “I love you, too.”

Starsky let out the breath he’d obviously been holding and smiled.

Hutch returned a smile so glowing it upped the illumination in the room exponentially.

“Uh,” I offered, into the silent mutual adoration that followed, “There’s a room upstairs, happens to be vacant tonight, in case you’d like to continue your discussion in private.”

Starsky grinned at me, and I reveled in it. Hopefully we’d weathered Aunt Celia’s ‘something’ and everything was going to be alright.

Starsky caught Hutch’s hand and practically dragged him off his stool. “You may not believe the story I’m going to tell you, babe, but I swear it’s true.”

“If you don’t believe him, Blondie,” I crowed, “I’ll tell you the same one and it’ll be word for word.” I handed them their beers and drank from my own.

“Huggy,” Starsky began, stopping at the foot of the steps, still holding Hutch’s hand and looking at me with the strangest expression I’d ever seen on his face. “I’ll never be able to --”

“Well,” I broke in, laughing happily for the first time in what seemed like forever. “I guess you owe me.”

“Whatever this is about, Hug…” Hutch was obviously confused but definitely going with the flow, “put it on our tab, please?” He looked back at Starsky and they melted into each other’s eyes.

“You got it!” I half-hollered, deliberately breaking the spell so they could get moving.

After they disappeared up the stairs, I looked at my bar full of patrons. They appeared to be unaffected by the out-and-back six days’ time tangent we’d all just experienced. Did it really happen? I took a sip of beer, turned my back on the unknowing crowd, lifted the phone and dialed. Glancing up the stairs, I smiled. Oh, yeah, it happened.

“Aunt Celia?… No, it’s over, we’re good…. I can hear you smiling, too. But I gotta ask, are they gonna be okay now?…. Right… I understand…. I’ll tell ‘em…. And, Aunt Celia? Thanks!”

END


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